Eat Thy Neighbour Read online

  I tried to get away that very day but could not, so I lived off the flesh of these men the better part of the 60 days I was out.

  I cooked some of the flesh and carried it with me for food.

  The confession also explained just how he managed to escape from the Saguache jail. ‘When I was at the Sheriff ’s in Saguache I was passed a key made out of a pen-knife blade . . .’ The name of the friend who smuggled him this key was never divulged.

  If there had been some original doubt as to what, if anything, Packer would be charged with, it had long since disappeared. The horrific find at the campsite nine years earlier, along with Packer’s constantly shifting confession, led the authorities to charge him with the single murder of Israel Swan, presumed to have been the first of the party to be killed. Packer was clapped in irons and hauled back to Lake City to await trial for first-degree murder.

  The courtroom of Judge Melville Gerry – Hinsdale District Court, Lake City, Colorado – was packed on the morning of 6 April when case number 1883DC379, the case of the ‘Colorado Cannibal’, went to trial. The trial lasted a week, but when the jury returned from deliberation on the afternoon of the 13th, the verdict was no surprise. Alfred Packer had been found guilty of murder.

  In his sentencing of Packer, Judge Gerry said, in part: ‘A jury of twelve honest citizens . . . have set judgement on your case, and upon their oaths they find you guilty of wilful and premeditated murder . . . to the other sickening details of your crime I will not refer . . . On the 19th day of May 1883, you will be taken to a place of execution . . . and you, then and there . . . [will] be hung by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead, and may God have mercy upon your soul.’

  The vast and furious mob that had gathered outside the courthouse had no intention of waiting until mid-May. What if Packer escaped again? Rowdy and fuelled by booze, they surged towards the courthouse doors and were only held back by the Sheriff and his deputies, who threatened to shoot the first man who tried to touch Packer. A terrified Alf was bundled through the crowd, shoved into a waiting police wagon and hurtled through the gathering dusk on a wild ride to Gunnison where, rather than having his neck stretched a few weeks later, he remained in jail for the next three years.

  Following his conviction, Packer’s lawyers immediately filed an appeal on the grounds that the alleged crime, and the laws governing them, had taken place while Colorado was still a territory. The trial, however, had taken place after it had become a state and certain laws had been changed in the process of statehood, those pertaining to the charges against Packer being a case in point. The appeal was heard in the Colorado Supreme Court and the conviction overturned in October 1885. If the state still wanted Alf Packer, they would have to try him again – so they did.

  Packer’s second trial took place in Gunnison, where he was still being held prisoner. Although he was exonerated of premeditated murder, he was found guilty on five counts of manslaughter. Given a minimum sentence of eight years per charge, Packer was sent to the Colorado State Penitentiary at Cañon City where, considering he was already forty-four years old, he would undoubtedly spend the rest of his life.

  Years passed and tales of ‘Alfred Packer the Colorado Cannibal’ had long since ceased to make the news, much less the headlines. But in 1897 Packer wrote yet another version of the horrific events that had taken place in Slumgullion Pass, during the winter of 1874. This new, much longer and improved version of his story was penned at the request of editor D.C. Hatch of the Rocky Mountain News out of Denver, who hoped to get a little mileage out of an old story. This time, Packer’s statement ran to more than 3,000 words. He obviously worked hard to generate as much sympathy for himself as possible, as the two-sentence extract below makes clear.

  Can you imagine my situation – my companions dead and I left alone, surrounded by the midnight horrors of starvation as well as those of utter isolation? My body weak, my mind acted upon in such an awful manner that the greatest wonder is that I ever returned to a rational condition.

  When Packer’s account was published it generated the interest Hatch had hoped for, not only among the general public, but also on the part of a woman who went by the most unlikely name of Polly Pry and worked as a journalist for the Rocky Mountain News’s major competition, the Denver Post.

  Today Ms Pry would be labelled a ‘politically correct’ scandalmonger; at the end of the nineteenth century she was called a ‘sob sister’ and a ‘muck raker’. The terms may have changed over the past hundred years, but the meaning remains the same.

  Polly Pry, whose real name was Leonel Campbell, was the sort of journalist who took up causes simply because they were there to be taken up. In her world, there were no bad people, only victims who needed to be cuddled and coddled. To her credit, many of the causes she championed over the years were both worthy and noble. She supported miners and other underpaid workers in their struggle to have their unions recognised. She must have raised a lot of ire over the course of her career, because on at least one occasion an attempt was made to assassinate her in her own home.

  In late 1899 Pry, along with the Denver Post’s legal eagle, one William ‘Plug Hat’ Anderson, was assigned by the Post’s co-publishers and editors, Frederick Bonfils and H.H. Tammen, to get the Packer case reopened and wring as much news out of it as possible. It was a job for which the pair were ideally suited. Polly was a Pollyanna if ever there was one, and ‘Plug Hat’ was the epitome of every nasty lawyer joke ever told.

  With Pry taking the lead, they went on the theory that if murderers and rapists could regularly be let out on parole, then a man convicted of five counts of manslaughter was due no less. The fact that he may, or may not, have slain his victims to eat them was, technically, of no legal consequence.

  Meanwhile, ‘Plug Hat’ Anderson tried to find a precedent that would stand up in court. The angle he hit on was both ingenious and workable. According to Anderson’s brief, the alleged murders had taken place within the boundaries of the Los Pintos Indian Reservation and therefore, Packer’s case should have been tried in federal court, not in a state or territorial court.

  By now, the Colorado legal system had no real interest in Alf Packer; he had already been tried twice and taken up the time of the State Supreme Court with his bothersome appeal. The best thing to do was simply to get rid of him. Consequently, and probably with much frustration, in January 1901, Colorado Governor Charles Thomas consented to parole Packer on medical grounds. According to the wording of the original parole document, dated 7 January, Packer was being released because the prison physician had certified that he suffered from ‘hydrocele and Bright’s Disease’. Hydrocele is defined by Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as ‘an accumulation of dangerous fluids in a bodily cavity’. Bright’s Disease is described as ‘an archaic term describing a generalized, chronic kidney complaint’.

  After being incarcerated for almost seventeen years Packer was overjoyed. Polly Pry was happy because she had done something ‘good’. ‘Plug Hat’ Anderson was happy because he would get paid and the Denver Post’s publisher/editors were happy too. In the last case, Bonfils and Tammen were happy not because they had done what they thought was right, or even because Pry’s story had sold a lot of newspapers; they were happy because they were going to make a lot of money out of Alf Packer. It seems that Bonfils and Tammen not only owned the Denver Post, but also the Sells Floto Circus, and they had offered to take up Packer’s case on condition that he join their travelling troupe as a sideshow freak. Evidently they thought there would be a big appeal in advertising ‘Alf Packer the Colorado Cannibal’ all across America.

  So everyone was happy. At least they were happy until Governor Thomas attached a single condition to Packer’s parole. Possibly because 1900 was an election year and Thomas wanted to avoid being accused of turning America’s only convicted cannibal loose on the country at large, or maybe it was just to ensure Alf ’s good behaviour, he stipulated that Packer had to remain in the Denver area for a
period of not less than six years and nine months after his release. Although Packer described the condition as ‘arrogant and vicious’ he accepted the offer. Bonfils and Tammen were less sanguine about the restriction.

  What happened next is unclear, but conjecture allows us to assume that because Packer’s movements were restricted he became useless as an attraction in a travelling circus. It is also possible that Bonfils and Tammen then refused to pay ‘Plug Hat’ Anderson because the case had not turned out to their complete satisfaction. Whatever the reason, Anderson and his employers got into a terrible row and in the finest tradition of the Wild West, the lawyer shot both Tammen and Bonfils. What eventually happened to Anderson is unclear, but both Bonfils and Tammen recovered from their wounds and apparently held no animosity against Packer for the incident.

  Once free, Alfred Packer moved into a small house in Littleton, Colorado, where, reportedly, he became a model citizen, was liked by his neighbours and spent the rest of his life as a vegetarian. In truth, he was probably looked on as a curious relic of America’s fast disappearing Old West. He died on 23 April 1907, one day after his sixty-fifth birthday, and was buried in Littleton’s Prince Avenue Cemetery. Because he had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, he was accorded full military honours at the interment. His grave was, and still is, visited by thousands of tourists every year.

  Nothing else of much note happened in Alf ’s life – or death – until 1989 when a forensic expedition exhumed the bones of his victims, who had been buried near the campsite at Slumgullion Pass. Having remained in surprisingly good condition, the evidence of their murders was clearly shown by the hatchet marks in their skulls. Forensic examination also showed that certain portions of their flesh had been cut from the bone with a skinning knife. Most noteworthy, however, was a bullet hole in one of the pelvises. To check this evidence against Packer’s testimony that he had shot Bell when the man attacked him with the hatchet, lead scrapings from the wound were compared with bullets still resting in the revolver which had been confiscated from Packer at the time of his first arrest, and was now housed in the collection of the Museum of Western Colorado. Amazingly, the metal samples matched perfectly, supporting Packer’s claim that Bell had murdered the other men and that he, Packer, had only killed Bell in self-defence. ‘Alferd’ Packer may have been a cannibal, but it seems likely that he was not, after all, a murderer.

  Throughout the century since his death, Alf ’s weird tale has, somehow, continued to gnaw at the bones of America’s popular imagination. From time to time Alfred Packer fan clubs have been formed, allowing his legend to grow large enough for folk singer Phil Ochs to write a song in the early 1960s entitled ‘The Legend of Alfred Packer’. A few years later, in 1968, students at the University of Colorado, at Boulder, named their new cafeteria the Alfred E. Packer Grill and fourteen years after that, in 1968, a statue of Packer was erected on the campus. The following year James E. Banks wrote Alferd Packer’s Wilderness Cookbook, published by Filter Press.

  With his fame now spread far and wide, two movies were made about Alf ’s life. The first, The Legend of Alfred Packer, came out in 1980, and in 1996 Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the animated South Park television series, wrote, directed, produced and starred in Cannibal: The Musical, a bizarre, over-the-top, song-filled rendition of Packer’s life.

  Those who find themselves hungry for souvenirs of the Old West’s only convicted cannibal should visit his online store at www.everythingalferd.com. (note the alternative spelling of his name) where you can buy everything from the movies mentioned above to mugs, tee-shirts and Christmas cards.

  Eight

  This Little Piggy Went to Market: Karl Denke and Georg Grossman (1921–4)

  W ar, and the inevitable economic hardships that follow in its awful wake, can rip even the most stable societies to shreds. When Germany lost the First World War in 1918 the resultant chaos was unequalled in modern history. The governments of the triumphant allied powers – France, Great Britain, Italy and the United States – demanded that Germany reimburse them for every penny they had spent on the war. Faced with this clearly impossible demand, the German economy went into free-fall. Inflation spiralled so far out of control that it became cheaper to burn money than to buy wood or coal. A life’s savings could be wiped out in a matter of days. As factories and businesses collapsed and banks failed, unemployment soared to epic proportions.

  The disaster was compounded by a severe food shortage linked directly to the economic implosion. Farmers simply could no longer afford to raise and sell their products. A piglet that may have cost a few marks to buy in 1920 suddenly cost millions of marks to keep. Even if a cow or pig was slaughtered and taken to market, trying to sell it at anything less than a dead loss would have made it too expensive for people to buy, even if they had any money, which most of them did not. The German depression was a recipe for social and political disaster. Eventually its effects would cause the worldwide depression of the late 1920s and early ’30s and be the prime factor in the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, but in the early and mid-1920s, its effects remained more localised; that is not to imply they were any less horrific for the people involved. In the frantic, paranoid atmosphere of a poverty and famine-stricken nation, only those who were emotionally and physically strong could hope to survive. The morally debased and emotionally unstable, like the men we are about to meet, as well as Hitler and his circle of cronies, often became social predators, while those least able to defend themselves became their victims. Although not all of these social predators were cannibals, it is interesting to note that there were more of this ilk than the subjects of this chapter, notable among them being the notorious child murderer and cannibal, Fritz Haarmann.

  Karl Denke was born on 12 August 1870, just outside the tiny mining village of Oberkunzendorf, Germany, located in the north-eastern province of Silesia near the Polish border. He came from a family of prosperous and respected farmers and seems to have had as much going for him as a young person in that place and time could reasonably expect, but he always had trouble keeping up at school. Undoubtedly there were recurring family arguments about his academic performance because, at the age of twelve, he ran away from home and took a job as an apprentice gardener.

  What he did and where he lived over the next dozen years is almost entirely unknown, but he must have remained on relatively good terms with his family. When he was twenty-five his father died, leaving the farm to Karl’s older brother but willing enough money to Karl for him to buy a small farm of his own outside Oberkunzendorf. It would seem that farming was simply not Karl Denke’s forte because the land failed to make a profit and he eventually sold it, using the money to buy a two-storey house in the nearby town of Münsterberg, now Ziebice, Poland.

  Next door to his new home Denke rented a small shop where he sold food and daily necessities to the people of his neighbourhood. Over the years he became well liked and respected among the town’s 8,000 occupants. A pillar of his local Evangelical church, he dutifully pumped the bellows of the old church organ every Sunday morning and was cross-bearer in the funeral cortège when one of his fellow parishioners passed on to their final reward. He neither drank nor chased women. He liked children and was kind to friends and strangers alike. When a homeless person passed through Münsterberg, Denke was among the first to offer them a hand-out, occasionally allowing one of them to stay in his house long enough to receive a few hot meals, a clean bed and a hot bath. As he aged people began referring to him simply as ‘Papa Denke’, as though he was everyone’s favourite uncle. He may never have become rich or famous but he had good friends and there was always enough food on his table. To all appearances it seemed that Karl Denke was the type of person we would all like to have living next door to us.

  Eventually, like nearly everyone else in the German Empire, Denke’s life was shattered by the aftermath of the First World War. His shop failed in the depression and in 1921 he was forced to sell hi
s house, which the new owners divided into a number of small apartments. The income from the sale allowed Karl to rent a two-room flat on the ground floor of his former home. In an effort to keep some money coming in Denke applied to the local police for a street vendor’s licence. Not surprisingly, they issued it at once.

  During the week Karl went from door to door selling shoelaces, trouser braces, belts, homemade soap and other trinkets, and once a week he took his small stock of goods to the nearby town of Breslauer where he set up shop in the municipal market. Soon he added home-packed jars of pickled pork to his inventory. Due to the food shortage caused by so many farm failures, the meat turned out to be one of his biggest selling items. Eventually, he applied to the Butchers’ Guild in Warsaw, Poland, for a licence to sell his canned meat there. The licence was granted and Denke’s small circle of customers slowly expanded beyond his local community. Although at the age of fifty-two it was unlikely that he would ever find a real job, at least it looked as though he would not starve.

  Even in such dire economic straits, Denke remained as kind and charitable as ever. When a straggler from the army of displaced people who were now wandering across the German landscape passed through Münsterberg, they were always welcomed at Papa Denke’s flat. Undoubtedly, these lost and friendless folk were grateful for even this small act of Christian charity.

  The first sign of trouble came on 21 December 1924, when a young, itinerant man by the name of Vincenz Olivier came staggering out of Denke’s apartment bleeding profusely from a head wound and screaming his lungs out. Alerted by the commotion, Denke’s upstairs neighbour, a cab driver named Gabriel, came running out to see what was going on. As Gabriel emerged from his rooms, a young man covered in blood slumped into his arms jabbering that the old man in the ground-floor flat had just tried to murder him with an axe. Incredulous, but concerned for the injured boy, Gabriel gently led him to the local police station where the police hurriedly summoned a doctor to tend Olivier’s wounds.